Please help me with a personal project. Tell me what you think "the most balanced games" are. Don't include sports. Stuff like Chess and Backgammon, while true, isn't that helpful either. These should be competitive multiplayer games that have demonstrated they hold up to high level play.

It seems like the games I'm looking for have to have the concept of different races/classes/characters/sides to qualify. Otherwise, it doesn't mean much to say something like Settlers of Catan is "balanced." It's a great game and all and we could study it to learn how to make a great game, but not really how to balance a competitive multiplayer game.
My nominations:

• StarCraft
• Fighting Games:

• Street Fighter (Hyper Fighting and Super Turbo)
• Virtua Fighter
• Guilty Gear
• Soul Calibur 1 (yeah, I said it)

• Magic: The Gathering
• Puzzle Fighter: HD Remix (??? I don't even know, but I can nominate it at least!)

StarCraft probably requires no explanation. Guilty Gear designed defensively by including many self-correcting balancing features, as well as lots of tuning over the many versions of the game. Virtua fighter has relatively low variety (compared to Guilty Gear) but extreme care has been taken over MANY iterations (over 14 versions of VF so far, maybe way more, I lost count). Soul Calibur 1's parry system does a lot to level the playing field, and it was pretty balanced in general anyway (SC2 and 3 maybe not so much and ruined by bugs on top of that).

Magic: The Gathering also has a defensive design with somewhat self-correcting balance. I realize this one is probably very controversial because there are times in the history of the game that it was pretty unbalanced, but I also lived through long periods where the so-called type 2 environment was healthy, had no banned cards, and a diverse set of viable decks at top-level play.

Does Counter-Strike belong here? Team Fortress 2? Halo? Enemy Territory?

Please add your own nominations.

--Sirlin

Giving out truly unbiased and thoughtful awards is a lot of work and requires a lot of research. It also yields pretty predictable, boring results, so that's why my awards are totally biased and generally unfair. Also, don't you hate it when award stuff starts counting up from like the top 100 when you just want to know the #1 winner? Me too, let's start with that.

Best Game of 2007: Portal
Even though it seemed packaged as thrown-in extra content on the Orange Box disc, the game is a real gem. You get to control your character immediately with no intro story. Even though there are no cutscenes or story segments, you learn the story of what's going on through context and voice acting from the computer that runs the facility. And most importantly, the portal mechanic itself is great fun and the developers did wonderful puzzley things with it. This is a good concept with great execution.

2nd Best Game of 2007: Tie! Chess, Go, Magic: The Gathering, and World of Warcraft: Trading Card Game
Just a reminder to look outside of just video games. These are hard to top, and honestly as good as Portal is, these games will be much longer-lived.

3rd Best Game of 2007: Resident Evil 4 Wii
You might be saying, "But Resident Evil 4 came out in 2005, didn't it?" Ok, that's true. Last year, you might remember that I was grumpy the game did not even get *nominated* at the 2005 Game Developer's Choice awards, and was somehow disallowed from a couple other award givers due to some technicality about the exact release date. That prompted me to, you know, accidentally include it in my 2006 awards due to a reverse-technicality.

But now we had a Wii version of the game in 2007, and it's definitely a barely, slightly better version than ever before. Aiming with the Wii remote makes the game feel a little better, and the prerendered cut scenes are actually real time in this version, making the game slightly more consistent-looking. It's two years old, but still quite an achievement.

4th Best Game of 2007: Super Mario Galaxy
I wrote an article about this game that will appear on gamasutra.com, so you'll have to wait for that to hear more. The short version is that in addition to having great art, this game is rare in that it evokes the feelings of surprise and wonder.

5th Best Game of 2007: Rock Band
This game resonates with hardcore gamers and even non-gamers, so it's doing something right. I'm missing the genes that make people care about music, and even I like it. There aren't many games I can play with my girlfriend, but this is one of them (and was Mario Galaxy, btw).

And now for some specialty awards.

Best Puzzle Game of 2007: Puzzle Fighter HD Remix
The original Puzzle Fighter is, in my opinion, the best 2-player puzzle game there is. Now that it has updated drop patterns for better balance and new graphics, this is lock. Factor in that I did the balancing on this game myself, and consider yourself lucky I didn't put it as best game of the year.

Worst Award Nominations of 2007: Gamespot's nominations for Best Puzzle Game. They managed to scrape up FIVE puzzle games that did not even include Puzzle Fighter. Ha! Seriously?

Award for a Bunch of First-Person Shooters: Tie! Crysis, Bioshock, Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty 4, and Halo 3.
These were truly a bunch of first-person shooters.

Game Whose Amp Was Turned Up to 11: Every Extend Extra Extreme (XBLA)
Have you seen this thing?? It's a visual extravaganza. See my post about it here, but the short version is that it's the most incredible, mesmerizing screen saver I've ever played.
Best Character of the Year: The Weighted Companion Cube
There's something about this metal box with hearts on it (from Portal) that sticks in my mind. Other characters might have had more polygons or emotions or were humanoid, but the Weighted Companion Cube is hard to beat.

Hardest Gaming Thing to Buy: Nintendo Wii System
Did you try to buy these things? I tried to buy three in December and ended up with zero. Amazing that it's sold out two years in a row.
Honorable Mention: Rock Band (At least I managed to buy one of these.)
Best Use of Usually Pointless RPG Mechanics: Puzzle Quest
Combining Bejeweled with leveling-up RPG stats could have gone horribly wrong, but somehow it ended up as more than the sum of its parts.

Most Underrated Game of the Year: Settlers of Catan (XBLA)
IGN: 7.7. Gamespot: 7.9. I don't get it. What do you want form this game? It's an incredibly well-designed board game, usually regarded as one of the best and most landmark board games of all time by boardgamegeek.com (or in the top 5 at the very least). And now we have an absolutely wonderful translation to digital form, easily and cheaply available for download on XBLA. Maybe I should have put this in my top 5 of the year.

Most Mind-bending Game I Didn't Play Because It's On a Shitty System: Crush (PSP)
Please make this for Xbox or Wii or something, it looks really interesting.

Best Game That I Can't Ever Be Good At: Team Fortress 2
The art style is GREAT. The gameplay, from my limited understanding, seems great. I love the variety of abilities and the careful thought the developers put into balance and map design. If I liked games that involved spatial intelligence in a 3D world, or aiming, or relying on teammates rather than your own skills, then I would call this the best game of the year.

Best Game of Next Year That I Won't Be Actually Good At Either: StarCraft 2
It's going to be awesome and I'm going to be somewhat decent at it.
Most Reformed Game: World of Warcraft
You may remember a little soapbox piece I wrote about this game a while ago, and many of my objections have since been answered. Sure, solo play is still second class to grouping and the terms of service still add an unnecessary layer of squishy rules, but the game has made major advancements since I wrote that article. The old honor system is out and areanas are in. Arenas give rewards without demanding ludicrous amounts of time (at least I think, I don't actually play anymore). Raids have been reduced from 40 man to 10 and 25. PvP gear is good in PvP now, as opposed to raiding gear being the only viable gear at all as it was before.

I love all those changes, great job Blizzard. Now just allow me to pick a premade character for PvP so gear and time spent count for nothing and skill counts for everything, and then the game can be a real e-sport. There must be some way of doing that while still allowing it to appeal to the casual masses. If not, I'd like to make that e-sport game as its own entity. Dear publishers: fund my idea. Dear developers: let's make that game, and no Guild Wars doesn't count but it was a good try.

Best Game Made By My Friends: God of War 2
God of War 2 is really good, surely at least a 9 out of 10 if not more. It improved on the mechanics and enemies of the first game and was as polished as ever. If you want to know how to do combat in a 1p game and you don't feel like hiring me as a consultant, then at least look at this game.

Worst Game Ending of 2007: God of War 2
Sorry guys, but I haven't been so let down in a long time. Nothing felt resolved and it blatantly ended at the most unsatisfying point possible. You can't just call it an Empire Strikes Back Cliffhanger and get away with it. I was going to say 9.4, the ending took it down to a 9 for me.

Most Excruciating Beginning of a Game: Super Paper Mario
You have to play this game something like 17 minutes before you get to the actual beginning. It's like 8 minutes before you even do anything other than click through dialog. A like 10 minutes, an NPC asks you if you will accept some item. If you say no, he asks again. If you say no again he says you really should and asks again. If you say no a third time, you get GAME OVER and sent back to the title screen. Note that there was no possible way to save before then and that there is no way to skip the 8-10 minutes of dialog to get back. Wow.

Best Fighting Game of 2007: Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo: HD Remix
What, you haven't been playing this? I guess you haven't because it's not out yet. Well I've been playing it and it's really damn good. It's so fun now that special moves are easier for characters like Cammy and T.Hawk and that there are fewer character mismatches than before.

Best Fighting Game of 2008: Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo: HD Remix
Yeah, I said it. Let's hope it stands the test of time.

--Sirlin

The Xbox Live game Every Extend Extra Extreme (E4) isn't so much a game as it is a thing you do--like whittling wood on your front porch, or knitting. In this, uh, "software experience" your main action is to destroy your own cursor which causes a chain reaction of other explosions. The floating things that explode then leave powerups (loot!) for you to pick up.

There are several strange aspects to that. First, there are no "lives" so you can destroy yourself over and and over forever. Next, after you destroy yourself, you have three seconds of total invulnerability to pick up the powerups--and these three second bursts are the only times you actually play the game. If you get hit by enemies (as opposed to detonating yourself), then you lose all your powerups, which greatly reduces your ability to earn points. There is technically no reason you'd ever die this way though, because you can always detonate yourself within the 3 second shield period and never be vulnerable the entire game.

The gameplay actually involves collecting the powerups in the most efficient way possible. For example, you'd like to collect a few powerups that extend your invulnerable shields a couple seconds, then pick up the time extender and various bonus multipliers. The only way the game ever ends is if you run out of time, but you can pretty much always focus on collecting the yellow time powerups to keep your time remaining at an acceptable level.

The very first game of E4 I played, I got my bearings and figured out what was going on. The second game...well I'm still playing it. It's been 2.5 hours so far with no sign of stopping. At some point I paused the game to answer the phone. At another point, I went to the grocery store. Now I stopped again to write this post. But my session of E4 is still there waiting, ready to go on forever if I like. I have 28 trillion points right now (yeah, trillion). I know you have BusyBeaver(7) points or whatever, so you don't have to tell me.

I'm not actually knocking E4. Like Rez, I enjoy it as an experience. I was totally shocked to see that my game session lasted 2.5 hours, because I didn't remember playing it for so long. It's a hypnotizing synethsesia that gives an overworked brain a vacation from itself for a while.

Another interesting property of the game is that on the one hand, it requires almost no skill because a very simple and obvious strategy allows you to play virtually forever. On the other hand, there is a skill in knowing when and where on the screen to detonate, when to cancel the chain reaction, and which powerups to get if you are trying to *efficiently* get a high score. That actually makes it nearly an ideal game to be used for crafting goods in an MMO. Anyone could play forever to get enough "magic essence" or whatever MMO quantity, but dedicated E4-crafters would learn to play efficiently and sell their greater wares to others who would rather spend their time killing monsters...or playing the Rez crafting mini-game to make green stitched linens or something.

I think E4 is going to be greatly misunderstood by the gaming public. As a relaxing flow experience, it hits the mark. Unfortunately most people probably don't understand the mark it hits.
--Sirlin

Update: I got to 126 trillion with no sign of it ever ending, but finally I wanted to play Rock Band with my girlfriend. Too bad I couldn't save and quit to continue the pointless, ProgressQuest-like journey. Instead I had to just let the time run out and lose. Anyway, E4 is quite an experience. Something compels me to keep staring at it. It's by far the best screen saver I've ever played.

While I've been busy writing about DRM, my friends at Sony Santa Monica (Derek and Eric) just finished up God of War 2.

1up review: 9.5
IGN review: 9.7
Gamespy review: 5 out of 5

Ok, so I was also busy releasing Sega Genesis Collection, Capcom Classics Collection Remixed and Volume 2, and wrote another article for gamasutra.com (will be up in a couple weeks). I'm also working on several projects for Capcom at Backbone Entertainment, a webgame for Kongregate.com, and three(!) card games of my own, but all that still doesn't amount to much compared to God of War 2, so my friends win...by a lot. Of course, they had some help, as they are part of the great Sony Santa Monica team, lead by Cory Barlog.

Derek and Eric have similar design sensibilities to me, so I was glad to see those ideas put into practice in the original God of War. They know that the way to make a good action/adventure game is to make in an *experience* rather than a test of skill. God of War 1 let you go on a grand adventure: fighting, climbing, puzzling through a labrynth, wandering through a desert, swimming through underground caverns, and so on. The point of it all was to make you feel like a part of the story and to let you experience the adventure. 

I've said before that overly difficult action/adventure games are just not the way to go, design-wise, and I'm sticking to my guns. Fans of Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry tend to disagree with me, and they say a game should be damn hard from the start and not dumbed down for the mass market. Again, God of War is trying to be an experience, not a skill test. Those who claim they want a skill test can always play the unlockable super-hard mode and other unlockable extra challenges (exactly as it should be). Those who *actually* want a challenge can play a real competitive game instead of a 1p adventure.

I also applaud God of War's short length of around 10 hours or so (the sequel is reportedly 12 to 14 hours). People with jobs don't have time for an 80 hour experience. 10 hours of polished excellence is exactly what I want from a 1p game, and I think I'm not outside of the norm there. Those who want more time can try the super-hard mode and extra unlockables.

I also have to mention the excellent combat mechanics of the original God of War. These guys have a background in Street Fighter and other fighting games, and it shows. A 1p adventure game can steal all sorts of mechanics from fighting games, but rather than make those mechanics "fair and balanced," it can make them overpowered and fun. The computer doesn't mind being beaten, especially if the player is having fun. The secret to translating competitive fighting game mechanics to a 1p adventure: make everything cancellable. Attacks cancel to other attacks or a roll or a to magic or to a jump. You can cancel throw whiff recovery and just about everything else. This allows for freeform combos and makes everyone feel like a hero, even though all that stuff is way overpowered in a 2p competitive game.

Anyway, God of War 1 had great combat, a great adventuring experience, great polish, great game length (short = good), and the right mindset (not a test of skill, but instead: easy fun). You should definitely preorder God of War 2 and actually play it. If you're interested in learning about game design, *this* is how you do it. Not through a book or my articles, but through examining the master-works of the field...and this will certainly be one of them.

--Sirlin

I meant to post this weeks ago, but after some of you told me to take a second look at Gears of War, I did. My first impression of the game as "just another pretty shooter" was not fair. As a single player game, it has a remarkble similarity to Resident Evil 4 (a good thing).

• In both games, there is no reticule by default and left/right on the analog stick is for movement.
• In both games, you hold a shift button to bring up the reticule.
• Both games are 3rd person, not first person (yay).
• In both games, you can perform context sensitive moves when close to objects, just as opening a door by pressing X.
• Both games rise above their shooter mechanics by putting the player in a long seires of carefully designed situations/mini-missions.

Gears of War also has a multiplayer game, which is "Counter-Strike without objectives." I personally like the format and found multiplayer to be pretty fun at my low level of skill, but I suck at it, so what do I really know. One thing I found strange was that the successful players seemed to hardly ever really fight at mid-range, and instead just dive around until they can shotgun you (or sometimes melee you) at close range. It seems like the designers intended more mid-range cover battles, but it either didn't turn out that way or my view is skewed or something.

I never disputed Gears of War's great presentation, so I probably should have given it "Best Production Values of 2006" at the least. Given it's presentation, solid controls, good mission design, and pretty good multiplayer, I think it probably deserved to be somewhere in the top 5 of my overall list--not as high as Resident Evil 4, but perhaps a bit above Cooking Mana DS. ;)

CliffyB: impressive job as always. Please make an update to Unreal Championship 2 where melee is just as good, but with even more lock-on abilities to reduce the importance of aiming. Thanks.

--Sirlin

Giving out truly unbiased and thoughtful awards is a lot of work and requires a lot of research. It also yields pretty predictable, boring results, so that's why my awards are totally biased and generally unfair. Also, don't you hate it when award stuff starts counting up from like the top 100 when you just want to know the #1 winner? Me too, let's start with that.

Best Game of 2006
Tie: World of Warcraft TCG and Magic: The Gathering

World of Warcraft TCG is a design masterpiece as far as I'm concerned. I tried for years to design a card game with a system as good as MTG, but with streamlined design choices and reduced chance of "mana screw." I was on a very similar track to what WoW TCG turned out to be. They made good choices, have good art, good flavor, and good card layout. The concept of special multi-player-only addons like the Onyxia Raid Deck is also great. The only thing WoW TCG really lacks right now is card pool deep enough to support really interesting decks, but that will come with time.

Magic: The Gathering has probably been the best designed game around for many years. Back in 2005, players had to contend with the overpowered Affinity decks and that damned Scullclamp card, but Ravincia and this year's Timespiral are a refreshing change. I especially like the idea of a block where each of the three sets are "past, present, and future," and the idea of reprinting 121 "timeshifted" (aka, greatest hits cards from the past) was an excellent one. Thank Mark Rosewater for that, great job.

It's kind of ironic that MTG is hitting a high-point by printing a block with so many old cards. This practice is an attempt to make a "good game, rather than a new game," but the ironic part is that the "oldness" of the set is the newness. Wrap your mind around that.

It's also interesting to note that neither of this year's winning games is a video game (yes, I know about mtg online, but that's not the point). It goes to show that while card games are focusing on excellent rule design, so many video games are focusing on boring mechanics like testing your ability to aim a cross-hair on a 2d plane. What a joke. (A pretty version of the "aim the cross-hairs game," Gears of War, does not appear anywhere in these awards.)

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend that you play either of the two winning games. Both are "trading card games" which means they use the rip-off scheme of selling you cards in random packs to limit your ability to make whatever deck you want. If you want a constructed, tournament-quality deck in either game, the market value is about $300. Yes, it's possible to somehow play a specific or semi-weird deck that's cheaper, but $300 is about the cost of most tournament-level decks in both games. This is absolutely ludicrous, and you should not support this system. You should instead support my upcoming card game (not to be confused with my upcoming Street Fighter-type card game or my upcoming Pokemon-style card game for Kongregate.com). This new card game will take me a year or two to get anywhere with, but it will NOT use the same rip-off marketing scheme of TCGs and yet it will contain the fun style of mechanics that those games offer.

2nd Best Game of 2006: Resident Evil 4 (PlayStation 2)
You might be saying, "Hey, RE4 didn't even come out in 2006, so it shouldn't be able to win this award," and you'd have a good point. But consider a few things. First, RE4 did not win the Game Developer Conference's award for best game of 2005. In fact, it wasn't even NOMINATED for any award. Instead, Shadow of the Colossus swept just about everything. (Shadow of the Framerate, I call it.)

Shadow of the Colossus should have won these awards:
Best Brave Attempt at Something that Didn't Pan Out
Worst Framerate of the Year
Worst Controls of a Horse, Ever

I usually give the Game Developer's Choice Awards a special significance because awards by game developers for game developers tend to be a little more thoughtful and less political than the rest, but the lack of RE4 to even be nominated last year really took credibility away from the entire affair. Tommy Tallarico's immature jokes while hosting the event didn't help either (why is he allowed to represent the game industry again?)

I remember seeing David Jaffe accept an award somewhere last year (I forget from where) for God of War winning game of the year. God of War is totally awesome and is my second favorite game last year after RE4, but even Jaffe mentioned that he probably only won because RE4 was not allowed into that award process due to a technicality. Well, it just so happens that a reverse-technicality made RE4 eligible for my awards this year, so it wins the #2 spot.

I would tell you about why this game deserves this spot, but I've gone on too long about all this other hoopla, so you'll just have to play it yourself to find out.

3rd Best Game of 2006: Metroid Pinball (Nintendo DS)
I've threatened all year to give this game my #1 game of the year award, but I guess it ended up in 3rd place. This is the most underrated game of the year. It's basically the best possible game of pinball I could even imagine. You fight bosses, you get weapon upgrades, and you play several mini-games that even let you transform into Sammus and shoot alien bugs. Best of all, your mission is to collect 12 artifact pieces as you teleport back and forth between 4 or 5 different pinball boards, plus a final-boss board. How cool is that? It even has a neat little multiplayer mode where you race get a certain score, and if you lose your ball, your points are reduced to equal your enemy's points, if you were winning (that keeps things close, usually!).

Metroid Prime pinball is, for me, the perfect pick-up-and-play DS game. I don't have to remember where I was in some huge story or map, or how this or that mechanic worked. I can just play for a few minutes, or for an hour if I want to try to get all 12 artifacts. Oh, and once you do that, you unlock a harder difficulty for the whole game. What's not to like about this?

4th Best Game of the Year: Wii Sports
My sister and my *mom* play this. Dear Nintendo: mission accomplished, you win.

5th Best Game of the Year: This is a close one, but I'll say Cooking Mama (Nintendo DS). Lots of DS games are some form of "here's a bunch of touch screen activities" but Cooking Mama manages to give a coherent wrapper to whole deal. It's easy to get into, yet offers some challenge if you want the gold medals, and there's lots of different stuff to cook. I'm sure this is an overlooked game, but it's great.

Let's mix things up a bit.

Best Game Consoles of the Year:
1. Nintendo DS
2. Nintendo Wii
3. No console was good enough for #3.
4. Microsoft Xbox 360

The Nintendo DS has like 20 amazing games right now and easily takes the top spot for consoles this year. Remember when everyone hated the DS when it first came out? Two screens, who needs that? Touch screen is a gimmick. Yeah, everyone was wrong.

The Nintendo Wii is fun and great so far and very consistent with Nintendo's goals. Because it doesn't have that many good games yet, it doesn't quite deserve #1. Thank you Nintendo for supporting innovation over graphics and for keeping the costs of game development low so developers can take risks rather than just making more cookie-cutter games.

The Xbox 360 is solid and good. Good graphics, good processing power, and a pretty good game library at this point. The real high-point of the console is, of course, Xbox Live. This online service blows the rivals out of the water. It's so easy to play any Xbox 360 game online (and to voice chat) thanks to the fairly standard interface and online features Microsoft enforces on all online games.

Xbox Live arcade is also an amazing, awesome thing for our industry. I totally love it and have personally bought and enjoyed several Live Arcade games. I really hope Microsoft continues to open the doors for amateur game developers to create game games for it using the XNA platform. Current game companies are certainly not where all of tomorrow's innovations will come from. I see MS's first steps toward cultivating the hobbyists and I'm very happy.

HOWEVER, you'll notice that the Xbox 360 somehow managed to lose out the #3 spot this year to, well, a blank entry. That's because the 360 was supposed to usher in the "HD era" and the damn thing doesn't have DVI or HDMI support at all. What an absolute embarrassing joke that is. Do you know WHY it doesn't have these things? It's because of DRM bullshit. Media companies are so paranoid that you will pirate their content that we're mired in this mess of next-gen video connections having DHCP to make sure you're watching a licensed signal. If content creators turn on the ICT bit, then you have to watch the signal at 1/4th the resolution through component cables or any non-DRM's interface. You can read this for more info.

The fake "good news" is that apparently Microsoft and other big companies have made deals so that the ICT bit will not be turned on by content providers for at least a few years. So you will be able to watch HD content through (crappy) component cables without getting the 1/4th resolution thing happening. But what you won't get is a DVI or HDMI cable for you Xbox 360 because Microsoft is too afraid of piracy. DRM politics yet again make a piece of technology Defective By Design.

Speaking of Microsoft and products that are Defective By Design because of DRm, check out Leo Laporte's, um, passionate rant about how the Microsoft Zune is the straw that broke the camel's back. It's a device so cripled by DRM issues that he thinks the music industry will finally lose this battle.

Hey, music and movie industries, I have a sidenote for you. In 2007, I am going to go full gear into pirating your content because your bullshit about DRM has caused so many crippling problems that I can't take you seriously anymore. If you want me to buy stuff again, it's really simple, I'll tell you exactly how. When a new movie or tv show comes out, give me the ability to buy it legally from you. When I buy it, give me unlimited download rights forever to download that show in any resolution I want, with no DRM. If you do this, I will gladly stop all pirating activities. I won't have to worry about torrents being seeded, about getting viruses, or about DRM. I will have no reason left to get content from anyone other than you. Offering a better product (the one I just described) is a better solution than gimping your own product and threatening legal action if people want the ungimped version. Figure it out.

Sony is such a DRM-obsessed dinosaur, I don't even know where to begin with them.

How about some more awards?

Worst Save System of the Year: Dead Rising (Xbox 360)
Dead Rising is great in all sorts of ways, but it's hell-bent on ruining my fun with it's hardcore save system. When you die, you get a confusing message about how if you want to keep your stats, you have to start over. Well, I wanted to keep my stats, so I clicked that one, and I had to start over THE ENTIRE GAME, from the opening movie, on. I was suckered into doing this one or two more times, until I finally decided to just press on. By pressing on, I mean that when I died, I have to "restore game" from my last save point, which might have been hours ago if I forgot to save recently. You can't save anywhere you know, you have to actually go to a save point.

Dead Rising is, on the one hand, a "sand box game" that lets you just explore and do whatever you want (there's plenty to do!) and yet it is also a weak-sauce attempt at some form of Groundhog Day game where I have to keep starting over to get the perfect run, or give up on that but have to keep restoring from save points. What is this, 1980? This excellent game is ruined by overly punishing save system. I have better things to do with my time than put up with that.

2nd Worst Save System of the Year: New Super Mario Brothers (Nintendo DS)
Wow, what were they thinking? You can't save anytime you want, even though this game is on a handheld console. You know, the pick-up-and-play console where you might want to change games often. You have to either get to the next castle or mini-castle to save, or spend some hard-earned special coins to open a mushroom house to save (I totally don't want to spend coins on that).

Here's a thought. Let me save anytime I want. When I save, you don't have to save my exact position in a level (the hardcores would complain there's no challenge). Instead, just save a list of which levels I've completed and which special coins I have, that's it. Then let me turn the DS off so my girlfriend can play Nintendogs or Animal Crossing.

The most insulting thing here is that when you beat the game, you earn THE ABILITY TO SAVE on anytime on the world-map. Wow, so they had the sane-save system the whole time and only give it to me after I beat the entire game, nice. It's not like the save system you unlock makes the game overly easy or anything. The game in general gives you tons of extra lives for no apparent reason anyway.

It is, in my opinion, the highest arrogance of a game designer to think that the precious needs of his game outrank the real-life needs of the player to turn off the game and have some reasonable way to save (most of) his progress immediately.

Two games that did an unusually good job of balancing "always let the player save" with "keep some challenge" are Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (Nintendo DS) and Fire Emblem (GBA). In C:DoS, there are save points scattered around the map, like in many games. So you could keep playing until you reach one, then turn the game off. BUT, you can also pause the game at any time and create a "save marker." If you do, the game goes back to the title screen. The next time you load that save marker, the marker will be destroyed. The result is that anytime you want to stop playing, you can create a save marker instantly, then turn the thing off. You can resume from exactly that point. But saving right before the hard part doesn't help, because you can't go back to that save point more than one time.

Fire Emblem does something similar. You don't need to actively create a save marker though, you can just turn the game off anytime you want, it will automatically resume from exactly that point. I don't mean put it in sleep mode by the way, I mean turn it off and take it out of the console. Again, you can use the in-game system of save check-points, or you can create a save marker automatically turning the game off, but you can't return to that marked point more than once.

These games pass. They thought about accommodating the player, and they made some reasonable design decisions. Dead Rising and N:SMB should stand as examples of exactly what not to do.

Most Overplayed Fighting Games of the Last 10 Years:
Tekken Series and Street Fighter 3 Series

As for Tekken, Virtua Fighter is deeper and Soul Calibur has better, easier controls. Tekken is in a weird middleground that I don't understand. As for SF3:3rd Strike, it's overly floppy animation, total lack of focus on controlling space (parries ruin the positional games common in fighting games), and generally simplistic engine make it a bottom-of-the-barrel offering. Try one of the games below, instead:

Best Fighting Game of the Last 10 Years:
Guilty Gear XX: Slash (Japanese PS2 Import)

Often, retrospective awards take into account how much of a breakthrough a game was at the time. My award is meant this way: If, *today* you have every fighting from the last 10 years in front of you, which should you actually play?

The Guilty Gear series has combined the best features from the genre's history into an excellent overall game. Nice art, most varied set of characters in any fighting game (far more varied than any 3d fighting game), and great, great mechanics. Yeah Ky is too good or whatever, but oh well. This is a masterpiece of fighting game design and deserves your attention if you have any interest in the genre at all.

2nd Best Fighting Game of the Last 10 Years:
Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (playable on Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 2 on PS2 and Xbox)

This game is much simpler than Guilty Gear, but there's something about it that holds up. It's still played in tournaments today, including the Evolution Fighting Game Series (www.evo2k.com). You can even check out my 30 minute video tutorial on this game, in the post before this one.

You can seriously still be reading this, so I'll end now. Congratulations to all the winners and losers.

--Sirlin

Unfortunately, I have to give the New Super Mario Brothers (DS) a 7.9 rating out of 10. My first impression, like pretty much everyone else, was somewhere around 9.5. The game has *great* presentation and plays as well as ever.

 Mario has a million game mechanics now. Really huge mario, really tiny mario, wall slide, wall jump, butt stomp, floating after jumping on springboards, diving from the float, ability to carry springboards, sidling on ledges, tightrope walking and jumping, one way floors, one way doors, turtle shell Mario, and so on and so on. All sounds great so far.

I have three main criticisms. First, I do not like the philosophy behind the secrets in this game. Every level has 3 large secret coins to find (sounds good), but the methods used to hide these coins are just not up to par. They are similar to the methods used in Donkey Kong Country 1, rather than the much better DKC2. NSMB has far too many cases where you really have no way of knowing if you should have done this or that thing to get to the coin, then you see you guessed wrong and now you must do the level over to get it. Even DKC2 had some of this with the forced-advancing levels, but NSMB has tons of it. I got really tired of seeing that I rode the wrong platform or whatever, and realizing I'd have to restart the level to get the secret coin I just passed. Secrets should encourage exploration, not constant restarting. DKC2 remains the best platform game at hiding secrets.

Not liking the methods used to hide secrets might not seem like a big deal, but it is in fact the central goal of the player. I take the entire goal of the game to find these secrets, so if they are about a 7.9/10 fun to find, then that's unfortunate.

Second, the emphasis on pits that kill you. Yes, the original Super Mario Brothers has lots of pits that kill you, but we're not in the 1980s anymore. Dying and doing the level over and over is a dated mechanic, and I expected NSMB above all other games to show us that. Unfortuantely it doesn't and is full of those familiar instant death pits, the concept of lives, and restarting levels. Just like God of War shows that a game is fun when dying makes you repeat as little of the level as possible, NSMB *should* have showed us that platform games are about exploring to find secrets, rather than lots of instant-death pits.

I can imagine some people disagreeing with my second point, but there is really no excuse for the third: you can't save anywhere! The only times you can save the game are when you beat a castle for the first time (end of world), beat a tower for the first time (middle of world), or pay secret coins to open a mushroom house. This is really, really bad.

For example, let's say that i just finished a level and got 1 of thd 3 secret coins because I jumped down the wrong shaft to get this coin or killed the only turtle that could be used to get the other one, or whatever. Then I play the level again and accidentally fall into a pit of instant death and die. Then I play it again and fall into some other instant death pit. Then I play it again and die again and again, because that's what happens in this game. Ok, I finally get the other two secret coins, yay! Now I repeat that entire process on the next level. Now I feel like playing some sudoku on Brain Age or my girlfriend wants to play Nintendogs. But NSMB won't let me save the game! I have to beat a tower or a caslte or spend coins on a mushroom house (which I probably wanted to save for some specific use).

One year, Shigeru Miyamoto was kind enough to appear at the Game Developers Conference and give a keynote lecture about game design. I still think about that lecture. In it, he said the #1 rule of game design is "When you press the jump button, the character should jump." He isn't kidding. In the original Tomb Raider, you don't jump when you press the jump button. Instead, you jump the next time that your running animation reaches the point in your stride where jumping would "look good." You should jump when you PRESS the jump button. He's really talking about having responsive controls in general, and doing stuff like having a basic attack come out when the button is released or something, as opposed to pressed.

Anyway, it's a great rule that reminds about responsive controls. Here's my proposal for rule #2 of game design: the player should be able to save the game anywhere! There is nothing so important in a game that it should decide it gets to supercede the player's real life needs to go do something else or play another game, or whatever. In NSMB, an example way to handle this would be to allow the player to save the game in the pause menu at any time. It wouldn't have to save your position in a level or the state of enemies in the level or anything so fancy. The only thing that really matters is if you finished the level or not, and which secret coins you found on the level.

In fact, they even have a mechanic in place already that would prevent you from getting the coins in a way the designers didn't intend. There are some coins you can get by jumping into a pit or something and getting the coin on the way down just before you die. Interesting to note that you don't actually get the coin until a couple seconds after you touch it, because it has to fall down to the coin holder on the bottom screen. So even if you got a coin, paused the game and saved right before you died in the pit, you wouldn't really have the coin. That's fine because you weren't SUPPOSED to jump into the pit to get the coin. The real puzzle was to do some certain jump or throw a turtle shell at it or whatever, and adding this save feature wouldn't diminish that.

Anyway, the game is fun and great looking and all that. Secrets should have been hidden much better, the game should have graduated from the 1980 idea of instant-death pits everywhere, and there is really no excuse at all for the save system. Believe me, I wanted to give this thing a 9.5 as much as anyone else.

--Sirlin

In no particular order...

I played Oblivion for about two hours and found nothing fun about it. I ran around a mostly empty field, chased a deer, found a random dungeon and killed everything in it for zero useable treasure. Finally I went to town and there seemed like a lot to do there, but at the 2 hour mark, I should have had a lot more fun already. The interface is not nearly as good as the World of Warcraft interface I used (mostly Discord Action Bars, but various other mods thrown in), and of course it couldn't possibly be as good. One game has a single, game designer-created UI while the other has an open system that lets anyone create almost anything.

All Oblivion did was make me want to play Warcraft again, since a few of my friends are on Ysera, the newest PvE server. They're looking to do at least 5-man content and to dominate the battlegrounds at 60. Anyone want to join? (horde)

Resident Evil 4 was the best game of last year. God of War was second best. Both were amazingly polished and well crafted. God of War had a good story, RE4 had good everything else.

Brain Age (DS) is awesome. I've had it for a month now because Nintendo's President Iwata gave it out to game developers at GDC. It's exactly what he was talking about last year when he said "games are only one planet of the software entertainment solar system." The entire game you just use the stylus (and occasionally the mic), with no buttons needed. It's not a "game" but it's entertaining and easy to get into.
Bleach (import DS) is incredibly good. It's a fighting game that's almost as good as Guilty Gear(!) and it's on the Nintendo DS! I'm totally blown away that such a good fighting game could be on the DS, but leave it to Treasure to pull that off.

Guilty Gear XX Slash (import PS2). This is the best designed fighting game, period, in my opinion. The GG series has always had soooo much variety in its characters that you can't even believe it. One character has inifine guard reversals, another can control two characters at once, another is the best version of Zangief ever, and so on. The two new characters in Slash are each weird and crazy each have 3 different modes: weak, good, too good. Each has totally different mechanics for going between those modes, and totally different trade-offs. No other game could have *that* much variety and still be a tournament-quality game. Arc Systems, you guys are on another level from everyone else.

Lost in Blue (DS). Seriously, screw that game. It is beatiful and peaceful looking. It has an interesting premise of being stuck on an island and trying to survive/escape. It has interesting use of the DS with digging up burried thing using the stylus to blowing on sparks with the mic to make a fire. It's as if someone wrote a game design for a calming, relaxing game, then gave that document to Itagaki at Tecmo to actually make the game. He must have said "I want the player to die over and over and over. Then die more. Die." Also, the screwy save system makes it so you are afraid to save because at any moment, you might be in an unwinnable situation already. I hope you like redoing the same parts of the game over and over. Being on a beatiful beach and having your character say "ugh...I'm dyyying" is eerie in a very bad way.

Guitar Hero is great and my girlfriend loves it.

Burnout on 360 is an A game trapped in a C wrapper, just like the previous Burnout. Also, it's way to similar to the previous Burnout (same tracks and most of the same features). But at least it's a racing game for people like me who don't even like driving. You can totally smash into everything and knock enemy cars off the road in order to get super-meter. Yay. Why can't I just pick a course, pick a mode, pick a car and go? Burnout 3 had this, and the last two have omitted this obvious, basic feature. Why does it autosave (and force me to wait and kick me out of the track selection menu) when I get a measly bronze medal on a new track? It wastes my time when I just want to restart the track to get a gold. There's a lot that's unpolished about the features, but underneath all that, I find it to be an excellent game.

Dead or Alive 4 (Xbox 360). This game is a lot better than people give it credit for. It's a reasonable fighting game with some interesting guessing games. Most of the time when you are in a combo, you have the ability to attemt to reverse out (meaning grab an incoming arm or leg). First there were Combo-Breakers in Killer Instinct (bad). Then there was the fixed version called Burst in Guilty Gear (great, you can only do it about once per round). DOA4 has an interesting new take in that you can "combo-breaker" during many, many combos, but if you guess wrong, you just let the enemy reset the combo and own you even more. Also, it has hands-down the best online play experiene of any fighting game. (And Gen Fu rocks.) I don't think it's nearly as good of a tournament game as GGXX, but it's still pretty good, and at least I can play anytime I want (online, there are plenty of opponents). Fighting game players should really buy this game to tell developers that good online play is vitally important.

Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition (PS2). DMC3 was another A game in a C wrapper. The Special Edition really addressed the issues of the last game by toning down the difficulty and implementing a non-retarded save system. You can play as Virgil as well as Dante now, too. If you like action games, it's worth playing.

Capcom Classics Collection Remix (PSP) just came out, by yours truly. It has good presentation and extras in the form of tips, art, music, and game histories. It also has the most configurable buttons ever: you can even turn the PSP sideways (for vertical-oriented games), set your buttons however you like, and even assign functions to various directions on the analog stick. Gamespot rightly called us out as the best networking on a PSP game collection, and best networking on a PSP game, period. Just like in an arcade, anyone can join in (from their PSP, ad-hoc) at anytime, and you don't have to reset your game or go to a staging room with them, or any of that bs that the other game collectiosn make you do. Oh, and this time around, all these games are perfect arcade emulations.
That's over 10 or 12 games I've mentioned. I'm tired even writing about them, much less playing them all!

--Sirlin

I don't why I play Bejeweled 2 (Xbox 360) so much, but I do. Perhaps it's that comfortable feeling of "being in the zone" that gamers and athletes like to talk about. It's that mental state where you have no conscious thoughts (all those memes floating around are tiring), and yet somehow you are playing at your best. As soon as you think about something, you lose the mental state and usually lose the game, too. For some reason, puzzle games provoke the "in the zone" effect fairly easily for me.

Anyway, maybe someone wants some tips on Bejeweled 2. I only play Action Mode, by the way. My high score is currently 454,000 (used to be about 900th best on the list, but not anymore). My second highest score is 453,000, I kid you not. Yes, I screamed "wtf" when I lost after being so close to beating my previous best.

So yeah, tips. Bejeweled is not random, that's the first thing to understand. If you have only one possible legal move left in Action Mode and you make that move, the next pieces that fall wil ALWAYS create a new move. This means that if you know you only have one legal move left, then you also know exactly where to look for the next one (it has to a move created by the pieces that just fell). Understanding this can often let you make as many as 5 or 10 moves in rapid succession, never pausing at all to find the next move.

It's also important to note that this "safety" feature (where you always have a legal move) is turned off if you have a hypercube on the screen. A hypercube is that swirling glowy thing you get for completing 5 gems at once. Because having a hypercube means you have a legal move (you can just switch it with any piece to destroy all pieces of that color), the game won't go out of it's way to give you legal moves.

Another factor is the rate that the timer counts down. As more time passes, the time-bar emtpies at a faster rate. Also note that lower game-levels give you fewer points than higher game-levels. This means that you want to get to the higher levels as soon as possible so that you'll have time to actually play level 5 without your time-bar emptying at light speed.

Now, you can also intentionally play very slowly. This will let you get way more points on level 1 than you ever could otherwise. The problem is that your time-bar will start emptying ridiculously fast eventually, and although you got more points than usual on level 1, you didn't get nearly as many points as you would have if you just played normally and got to level 4 by then, or whatever. It's possible that I'm missing some key component though, because the highest scores online show a gametime of 40 minutes, which seems impossible. The tme-bar would be filling so incredibly fast by then, that it's hard to imagine keeping up the play for so long. Maybe there is a way to slow down the time-bar's emptying rate, I don't know.

Anyway, the three of you who are obssessed with Bejewele 2 might find this mildly interesting.

--Sirlin

I once read a review that said you could count the number of seconds of loading time on one hand in Sony's God of War (PS2). The PS2 has notoriously bad loading times, so I didn't see how this was possible...but after playign the entire game, I had to say it was true. The sum total off all my loading times probabaly added up to 5 seconds over 10 or 12 hours of playing the game. Wow! That definitely contributed to fun of that action-packed masterpiece.

Loading times ruin games. Check out this absurd video of the loading times in THQ's Smackdown vs. Raw 2006 (PSP). I hope this is a joke, but somehow I think it's real.

I played one third of RE4 on GameCube, then got distracted by something and never finished. I just bought RE4 for PS2 and finished it one time through. Here are some highlights:

--Fairly bad story
--The shooting gallery mini-games are the worst idea to appear in any game this year
--The entire portrayal of the merchant is ridiculous and clashes with rest of the game (and his mini-games do even more damage to the 4th wall).

I give the game and A+, and it is the best game of 2005 that I know of (even taking God of War and World of Warcraft into account). It has an incredible amount of "design" in it. Every few steps there's some scripted scenario.

--Villagers are trying to get into a little two-story house. You must fend them off for X minutes.
--Pilot a small boat which is being dragged through the lake by a huge monster which you must defeat with a harpoon (a weapon only usable in this sequence).
--Get to the top of a castle while catapults are attacking you from all angles. You pretty much have to use the sniper rifle to take out the catapult operators.
--Protect a female NPC who is performing a task in an area you can't reach. Keep enemies off of her so she can complete the task.
--Survive a mine-car ride (with three connected mine-cars) while enemies jump into the car along the way.
--Use an infrared scope to see and shoot 4 special areas on one type of enemy, or he will keep regenerating and never die.

This list could go on and on and on. Not only does this game have great graphics, great sound, and a great core mechanic and controls...but it has so many specialized scripted sequences that it feels like about 20 games in one. I'm really blown away by the total experience.

It leaves me with one question though. Should games have that much content? Almost 20 hours of one play through (with soooo many different kinds of gameplay along the way) and a whole bunch of extra missions and replayablity afterwards. That kind of content costs tons of money to make, takes a long time, causes the publisher to bear a huge risk and makes them afraid to experiment. Plus, I'm not sure the average gamer wants a game that long. What a game of this quality that lasted 2 or 3 hours and cost $10? Should we be trying to make something like that? Or is that a bad idea for some reason?

--Sirlin

I tried to play Guild Wars. It's just so unpolished, clunky, and full of rookie interface mistakes that I can't even take it seriously. The moment-to-moment feel is so off-putting that I can't stand it for more then 5 minutes before I quit in frustration. I wanted to like it so much, because it's based on the "right" concepts of fairness rather than being rpg-heavy and caring about time invested way more than ability.

Here's a quick list of its crimes:

I can't leave the game running and on screen while I click on things on my second monitor. I have to minimize the game access anything on my second monitor.

I can't figure out how to turn off click-to-move. Even when "click to move" is off, I left click on an NPC or Monster or loot on the ground and my character runs towards it. I never want to move unless I move myself.

When I hold the right mouse button down and move the mouse, the camera and character move as expected. When I hold the LEFT mouse button down and move the mouse, nothing happens. I should be able to move the camera WIHOUT moving the character with this method. It's very painful to be missing this feature. In World of Warcraft I do this constantly and can't even fathom that this similar game doesn't allow this very basic feature.

Left clicking on a monster attacks that monster. I want left click to select things and never interact with them. Right-clicking should interact with them.

The "unit frames" (HUD graphics at top of the screen when you select a unit) look absurdly bad. Also, when you have a unit targeted, its name appears over him in text. This text looks like a joke or placeholder. Should be in a nice-looking small popup window with a decent font.

The green exclamation points over the heads of quest-givers are too hard to see. Should be more bold.

Art style of humans in this game bothers me. Almost all my options to make a male character look homosexual. Way too many options are for characters that look slight, slender, and dainty.

The mini-map spins around as I turn. This is totally disorienting to me and I want it to stay still.

The game has no jump fucntion. Not that it's really needed for gameplay, but it contributes to the overal clunky experience of Guild Wars when you can't climb up a little lip, two inches high.

There are weird invisible walls all over the place in levels. Makes it feel very restricted, but is at least consistent with the overal clunky Guild Wars feel.

When you rotate the camera quickly with the mouse, then let go, the camera takes a brief moment to smoothly come to a stop. I want it to move instnatly. This is very subtle, but bothers me every time I move the camera.

Guild Wars was my most anticipated game of the year(!), but the simple act of moving the character around and attacking is so unpolished that I can't even have fun with this game. :(

Now all the Guild Wars fans can get mad at me.
--Sirlin

It really is all about Dead or Alive Ultimate. (My gamertag is "Sirlin Prime" fyi.)

In this thread, I tried to find a competitive game to play that isn't sports or driving, doesn't reward "aiming" as a skill, doesn't involve "leveling up," and so on. http://www.sirlin.net/.ubb/Forum10/HTML/000040.html

Any fighting game would meet those criteria, except for the online part...until now. DOA is extremely playable online and puts the online implementation of other fighting games like CvS2 and GGXX to shame. Note that MK is a buggy, poorly made game that has put itself to shame without needing any help from DOA.

I always looked down on DOA as the pretty game with no gameplay. I think I now see it for what it is: a very simple gameplay system that is solidly put together. It's a tiny candle to VF's errupting volcano of depth. Even Soul Calibur is deeper (mostly due to sidestepping system based around horizontal/vertical attacks, and the "A" and "B" throws that have to be reversed differently.) Virtua Fighter has an intricate system of throw reversals, evades, and guard cancels (like the k-g cancel) that allows for deep guessing games. DOA just scratches the surface, but it still alows for yomi (knowing the mind of the opponent) and still has some good positional fighting elements (distancing between you and your opponent and your positions relative to obstacles in the arenas).

It's the networking features that really shine. The "arcade rooms" of 2-8 people, all watching, all using voice, and waiting their turn with their "quarters up" is great. It's exactly what my friends and I wanted CvS2's online (or any fighting game's online) to be in the first place. More importantly than any of that, though, the lag is amazingly low. It's proof that fighting games can work well online...something I was beginning to seriously doubt. Some people have said it only works well beause DOA has "not many inputs compared to other games." This is totally false, as the smoothness of DOA during a flurry of fast inputs is far less laggy than even moving your character selection box around in ggxx. I've noticed that in ggxx and cvs2, there are many situations where you see the enemy jumping in and you think "normally I would uppercut now, but because of the lag between my input and the move coming out, I would have had to dp about 1 second ago. Oh well." This is not how DOA works.

When there is lag during a DOA game, it is as if the entire game is in slow motion for both players. This is exactly how it should be. Yes, that means you have more time to input moves (and counters!) than you otherwise would. But that is a much lesser crime than the system other online fighting games have used. If your client has to "skip ahead" in time to catch up to the other player, it's toally disorienting and you can't tell wtf is going on. If the system tries to keep both players in sync by enforcing a lag between your inputs and those moves actually coming out in the game, then you have the very terrible situation I described above. Under this system, you have to do all your moves ahead of time...sometimes so far ahead of time that you have to do your response to the opponent's move before he even does his move. Imagine if you were playing against a friend at your house (not online) and you just set the game speed to be slow. That's what it feels like during the most laggy moments of DOA online. First, the game is still very playable even if the game is slightly slowed down and b) this doesn't happen very often.

Other fighting game companies really need to get their act together. DOA is kicking all their asses in online, and in 3d graphics. They are the gold standard in those areas. If their gameplay was improved (better throw reversals, better sidestepping for starters), they could really rise to the next level.

This has all really snapped me back into reality. It seems like kind of a joke to seek out competition in the form of level-based pvp in an mmorpg. In DOA (or chess, or Magic, Warcraft3), both players are on a level playing field (with regards to the materials they take into the fight) from minute 1. There is no need to "level up" for 100 hours first. There is no concept of fighting when someone is checking their mail in town or caught off guard. You're both ready, you both have equal access to all characters, moves, and techniques, and you don't need to rely on other people in any way. It's a one-on-one game, not a group-on-group game, so there's no concept of "my rock class can't beat that paper class one-on-one."

Anyway, feel free to find me online in DOA.

--Sirlin